MISQUAH — It happened Thursday morning, a little after six, in visibility that would have grounded anything with an instrument panel. The braver of Big Pelican’s two juvenile loons — the one that has spent two weeks hammering down the lake in fifty-yard sprints of spray and ambition — made its usual run, and then the sound changed, and the spray stopped, and it was up.

It flew. Not far and not straight: witnesses agree on perhaps three hundred yards, a shallow climb, one wide wobbling turn that took it briefly into the smoke and briefly out of the narrative, and then a landing best described as arriving. “It came down like a duffel bag,” said one of the anglers who saw it, “but it came down where it was looking.” The loon surfaced, shook itself, and issued a short tremolo that every person within earshot has independently translated as a boast.

The flight was recorded within the hour in the log kept all summer by Greta Solberg, grade 6, whose entries have tracked the pair from back-riding chicks to this. Her notation for Thursday runs, in full: “ONE FLEW. Not far, and not straight, but FLEW. The other one watched. I think it is deciding.” Her sister’s read-aloud ladder is at the library; the family’s week, it can fairly be said, is going well.

The second juvenile has not yet flown. It continues its runs with what observers characterize as increasing indignation, crashing farther each day, and the adults continue their supervision from a distance that has been widening all month — the loon version, apparently, of standing at the end of the driveway. Fall departure is still weeks off, and the smoke should be gone long before it matters. But the summer turned a corner Thursday morning, in poor air, over copper water, and this newspaper is prepared to say so: one of them flew. The other one is deciding.